Dieter Beware! Many of the popular ‘fad’ diets, often temporary in their nature, will often hold claims either untrue or true of every other diet. Your skepticism should be peaked when benefits are followed by personal testimony or anecdote. Some common claims made consist of things like: only lose fat and not muscle, become less tired, more energy, less hungry or jittery, better focus and the list goes on and on depending on who you talked to. I hope to go through a few of the reasons why the benefits mentioned above either are unfeasible or can happen with any diet.

There’s often two working definitions of diet: the first being preferred foods that one eats commonly, and the other being a temporary change in food choices to achieve a desired outcome (lower cholesterol, lower body fat%, more energy etc.). The how, what, and why to eat any given way has become a source of social identity for many people. This social attachment can often blind people to the core principles of healthy eating. We have all experienced this blindness in believing dietary misconceptions, regardless of what side of the dietary isle you are on. Some popular current diets that include misinformation in their dietary dogma are: ketogenic or Atkins, vegan, raw food or whole foods.

The misinformation: low carb diets, keto or Atkins preferentially burn fat. A low carbohydrate diet, like the ones previously mentioned will be taken to be defined as below 10% of total daily energy (TDE), because many studies have used this threshold. The current understanding of nutrition and metabolism: the body accesses energy trending in sugar->fat->protein, this does not change because of the type of food you eat. The liver, in coordination organs like the pancreas, plays a key part in keeping your blood sugar levels constant so whether you are eating sugar or making it (like everyone does between meals) you will be storing or burning fat. This is not unique to a low carb diet. The total caloric intake can provide a more accurate picture if an individual is in a condition to use body fat to make up for a lack of energy. Roughly ~3500 calories equates to a pound of body fat, which best looks like losing a pound a week at a 500 calorie deficit per day. Harvey, Holcomb, & Kolwicz, studied keto diets and found there was no significant weight loss benefits (2019). Keto diets do have their place, but a very specific niche: these diets may have advantages related to appetite control, triglyceride reduction, and reduction in the use of medication in T2D (type 2 diabetes Miletus) management. Atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease is typically increased in ketogenic diets due to increased animal product consumption, which often results in an increase in TMAO, which is a contributor to cardiovascular disease:  Park et al, noticed levels of TMAO can increase within a short amount of time when exposed to diets high in saturated animal fats (2019). Do you have epilepsy? Deficient in glucose transporter type 1? Or pyruvate dehydrogenase? Harvey, Holcomb, & Kolwicz lay out the advantages for you to go on the keto diet (2019)! Your friends wouldn’t tell you about that though, just your Doctor. Something to note, endurance athletes perform better when eating carbohydrates (Jager et al., 2017). This is why you can see them drinking lemon, sugar water (gatorade) during their games.

The misinformation: going vegan, raw food, whole food, is inherently healthier. The current understanding of nutrition and metabolism: any diet can prove adequate to provide a full spectrum of nutrients. It is true that the average north American diet would be better corrected to replace two servings of meat and dairy a day with vegetables; however, it is not necessary to avoid dairy and meat altogether. If vegans were to make an argument, it should be founded on the environmental costs of food and not the nutritional value of food. There are benefits to high fiber diets and their protective effect against heart disease. This in combination with red meat being linked to heart disease can have a two fold effect. The vegan diet can struggle obtaining nutrients such as iron, b12, and protein, though being aware of this usually is enough to make this a non-issue. Moderation is key.

I would speculate many of the reasons for some of this misinformation come from a few inherent qualities of nutrition and metabolism. Human metabolism is incredibly complicated and nuanced, it also has a huge barrier to entry to even begin to understand, so those with passion may feel excluded to understanding real research. It is really hard to study nutrition, even though we have incredibly talented researches they are not able to make many definitive claims: metanalysis can help us see large trends and make important prescriptive claims with high confidence but not certainty. The difficult nature of studying nutrition leaves a void of information ready for people to fill with intuitive claims that are not always backed by science. 30 years ago these claims, or wives tales, would be spoken word of mouth and couldn’t spread or been capitalized as heavily upon, but with the advent of social media, generic claims for any food product or diet can be monetized and incentivized. The combination of a lack of prescriptive nature from studying nutrition with people who have a lot to say about diet leads to many misunderstandings. Food is inherently politicized because food is cultural. Vegans know this when telling someone to “why don’t you just stop eating meat”, that phrase inspires a lot more passion than that of ‘just go for a run’. Those who love meat can cause the reverse “don’t you miss the taste”, neither of these questions are inherently combative yet the conversation following will almost always be heated. This cultural, political, personal association with food and ways of eating can prove to be effective barriers holding up misinformation.

References
Jäger, Ralf et al. “International Society of Sports Nutrition Position Stand: protein and exercise.” Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition vol. 14 20. 20 Jun. 2017, doi:10.1186/s12970-017-0177-8

Park, J.E., Miller, M., Rhyne, J., Wang, Z., and Hazen, S.L. Differential effect of short-term popular diets on TMAO and other cardio-metabolic risk markers. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. 2019; 29: 513–517 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jacl.2019.08.003

Harvey, L.K., Holcomb, L.E., Kolwicz, S.C Ketogenic Diets and Exercise Performance. Nutrients 2019, 11(10), 2296; https://doi.org/10.3390/nu11102296

Cover Photo by Anna Pelzer on Unsplash